The advent of global communications networks such as the Internet has presented commercial opportunities for reaching vast numbers of potential customers. Electronic messaging, and particularly electronic mail (“email”), is becoming increasingly pervasive as a means for disseminating unwanted advertisements and promotions (also denoted as “spam”) to network users.
The Radicati Group, Inc., a consulting and market research firm, estimates that as of August 2002, two billion junk e-mail messages are sent each day—this number is expected to triple every two years. Individuals and entities (e.g., businesses, government agencies) are becoming increasingly inconvenienced and oftentimes offended by junk messages. As such, spam is now or soon will become a major threat to trustworthy computing.
Although spam is becoming a significant problem with respect to computing over the internet, internet abuse in general is on the rise. Spammers typically abuse free email systems by signing up for hundreds of free email accounts to send out masses of unsolicited messages. However, other users have found ways to abuse the internet the many conveniences and the seemingly unlimited access to the internet as well.
Using automated techniques similar to spammers, these types of users have also been able to program their computers to automatically sign-up for things such as free products, free services, promotional give-aways, contests, and the like by creating a multitude of user accounts for the respective freebie. In particular, imagine that a computer is programmed by an abuser to sign up one actual person for a contest 1,000 or even 10,000 times, whereas legitimate users of the contest entry process may manually sign up a few times at best. As a result, the abusive behavior by the user can provide him/her with an overwhelming advantage in the contest. For a multitude of reasons, this adversely affects the sponsors and/or companies running the various applications and systems that are victimized. As the proficiency of hackers continues to increase, so do these forms of abuse. Thus, additional measures are needed to combat Internet and email abuse.